When patients enter Cory Costanzo’s practice, they quickly figure out what Dr. C (DDS, MSD), as he’s known, does for fun. The skateboard enthusiast’s foyer sports colorful skateboard decks on the walls and several decks have found a second life as the base for a glass-top coffee table. Even the practice logo has a stylized skateboard in it, and a hip, architectural half-pipe-like wall differentiates the office from its more staid contemporaries.

His new Fresno, Calif., location is ideally situated for year-round skateboarding – a fact that is reflected in the design of his open, airy new office. Costanzo is a skateboarder, and he gets out every weekend to practice, visiting many of Fresno’s great skate parks. It’s this youthful vigor that informed Costanzo’s goal: to build an office that reflected the fun, friendly, upbeat practice he had built, “where we don’t play Muzak over the radio,” he said.

In October 2009, as Costanzo considered renewing his lease, which was up in July 2010, he weighed his options. The building where he had practiced since 2004 lacked proximity to his target demographic, and he was renting more than 4,000 square feet of space that was originally intended for a group of specialists, but that plan never materialized. It was about this time that Costanzo’s Patterson Dental sales representative, Brett Constable, visited. Costanzo mentioned that he was thinking of building new, and Constable told him to go for it. “I’m kind of toying with the idea of building an office, or at least finding out what would be involved in building an office,” Costanzo said to Constable. “I had no idea where to start with something like that.”

Constable told him the first step would be finding a location, so he put a real estate broker in touch with Costanzo the very next day. “He took me around to a few buildings,” Costanzo said. “We nailed down the location that I wanted, and then the next step of the process was designing a full floor plan.”

From there, Constable and Charmen Brummer, his Patterson equipment specialist, provided contacts for the independent contractor, financing company and interior designer on the project with the goal of being a one-stop shop to make the office buildout less stressful for Costanzo. As the process of building a new office moved forward, Costanzo said his relationship with his Patterson team grew.